I don’t remember when Craig Kessler first commented at AriWriter, but a recent Google search shows his name at the bottom of an October 20, 2008 post about marketing your business online.
When he’s not working at small business advisor iSquare, you can find Craig, 23, running operations at financial management startup Budget Pulse (managing a website, blog, and Twitter account @budgetpulse).
And–I’m not bringing up his personal Twitter account (@craigkessler), or his Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, all of which he keeps active.
How about Craig’s secondary blog co-written by Matt Rosenberg called The Movie Banter? They have a YouTube channel, too!
Craig’s comment to me six months ago referenced this Gary Vaynerchuk video about the importance of online engagement as one way to calculate ROI:
The proof is in the measurement, so when you consider this status update from November 21, 2008 when Craig’s personal Twitter account surpassed 100 followers, he has nearly 1,100 groupies today.
I call that ROI.
You can’t compare Craig to so-called celebrities on Twitter like Jimmy Fallon and Demi Moore and Lance Armstrong; they have hundreds of thousands of followers because of who they are, not because of any sort of engagement. Jimmy, Demi, and Lance are not examples of ROI; they are examples of celebrity, pure and simple, the sort of movie banter that Craig and Matt blog about.
I enjoyed meeting Craig last week over drinks in Washington, D.C. and I’m pleased to devote my Saturday roundup to someone who ought to be congratulated by his Millennial peers and emulated by everyone else for grasping and doing what’s necessary to market a business–and oneself–online.
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Craig definitely has been an interesting follow. I found him via a random #journchat about a month or two ago and have definitely enjoyed the several times that I have been able to talk with him. I actually had no idea that he was working for iSquare and shall have to investigate further
. He also seems like a cool person to have drinks with according to your assessment Ari.
Stuart Foster´s last blog post..Learning and Listening
Thank you Ari for dedicating the roundup. When I first found your blog and began following, I was very naive and didn’t know the basics of social media and proper ethics and how to deal with the community. Although still have tons to learn, I have been able to learn a lot from your blog and interacting with you and others to develop skills and make connections. Meeting you with person for me could be considered the ultimate goal of social media in a sort of ways. Connecting with someone online, learning from one another, and then taking that online connection off-line and in person is exactly why social media is what it is today.
@Stuart I am a cool person to have drinks with, ha. I look forward to more interactions with you online, let me know if you are ever in the DC area.